Every night sometime between 1 and 4am, my toddler wakes and though my husband used to be the designated soother, our daughter has started to reject him lately which means one of two things.

First option is that David picks her up and brings her to me in our bed, so she sleeps with us all night kicking David so violently that he moves into her empty bed. bed (I, for one, possess supersonic hearing but have trained my body to feel nothing in sleep so, as long as they were silent, a bunch of giants could play volleyball with me in my sleep and I’d never wake up. Its a Darwinian thing, like my ability to eat a meal in under 5 minutes.)

The second option is that I get up and try to sooth Seconda back to sleep, usually falling asleep in bed with her

I’ve always thought that if you had to sleep with your kid for whatever reason, it was a better bet to sleep in their bed rather than vice versa, because you can always get up and leave their bed but just try kicking them out of yours. And that is why our firstborn, Primo, hasn’t been in our bed since he was a toddler.

But since we’ve put the two kids in the same room, I’ve realized there is a big problem with me sleeping in bed with one of them. Once I’m in that room, it is as if they can sense my proximity and rouse themselves from sleep to start a tug of war with me. “Mommy!” calls Primo in the top bunk. And as soon as I’ve gotten him back to sleep I hear, “MAMA!” from the bottom bunk, and as soon as I’ve drifted back off its “AHHHHHH!” from the top bunk again, and on and on until morning has mercy and ends my servitude.

But last night something different happened:

As usual, Sec started crying at 3am and I automatically stood up, like a drone, crawled into her bed, slung my arm around her and collapsed into sleep within 30 seconds. Some time later, I was awakened by a strange sound coming from the bunk bed above me.

It was a giggle. A someone-said-the-word-“underpants” kind of giggle. I thought to myself, “Is the kid awake?

Has he just been lying there all night long quietly drawing pictures or talking to himself or something and he’s now giggling about it?” The thought was so unsettling I lay there, wide awake, listening for more sounds.

Then came a louder, more emphatic giggle. An I’m-watching-something-forbidden-on-TV-and-its-really-hilarious giggle.

I lay motionless, poised to bawl that child out.

At the next giggle, I climbed up the ladder to deliver the stern talking-to and found my son totally, completely asleep. Giggling in his sleep.

It filled me with the most delightful, bubbly, happy feeling. Nothing on earth is better than seeing your children happy, especially when they are happy in their subconscious. I wish I could bottle the feeling of hearing his sleep giggle and take a nice long drink of it on the mornings when everyone’s uncooperative and late for school and its raining but we can’t find the umbrella and I forgot to pack lunch and the stroller’s suddenly missing a wheel. The Sleep Giggle High. Ahhh . .